On 5/22/06, prad <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
this is not openbsd specific, but i wanted to ask people who really understand the inner workings of programming languages.suppose that you have 2 conditions A and B where B take a lot of effort to determine (eg looking for a string match in a huge file). either A or B needs to be true before you can execute 'this'. the 2 if statements below are equivalent i think: if A or B: do this if A: do this elseif B: do this now, do they work the same way? in the second if A is true we don't need to go looking for B (the more laborious one). in the first, do both A and B get evaluated or does A get evaluated first (because it is first in sequence) and if it is true, no evaluation of B takes place? do all programming and shell languages handle this the same way? -- In friendship, prad ... with you on your journey Towards Freedom http://www.towardsfreedom.com (website) Information, Inspiration, Imagination - truly a site for soaring I's
most programming languages take this into account. if you have if (condition1 OR condition2 OR ...) foo end if condition2 is only evaluated/checked if condition1 results in 'false'. C, Java, Haskell do this, as do most shell languages (actually, all that i can think of). It's a pretty standard method for evaluating a disjunction within a conditional. Hope it helps, -Ryan
